The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to allow it to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Syrian nationals living in the United States.
More than 6,000 Syrians have the temporary protections, The Hill noted.
Trump Asks Supreme Court For Greenlight To End TPS For Syrianshttps://t.co/NEGuiF07lV pic.twitter.com/WQZvGGRPTq
— Forbes (@Forbes) February 26, 2026
The Hill explained further:
It marks the third time the administration has urged the justices to rein in lower courts that have blocked the administration from restricting Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which provides people from countries with unsafe conditions protections against deportation and a pathway to apply for work authorization.
“The Second Circuit’s ruling is indefensible,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote to the justices. “It flouts this Court’s two prior stays of materially similar orders in materially similar postures.”
Beyond an immediate intervention allowing the termination to move forward, Sauer called on the justices to take up the case on their normal docket and settle the broader legal issues “so this cycle does not repeat a fourth, fifth, or sixth time.”
Since taking office, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has looked to restrict TPS for various countries. Lawsuits have been filed over changes to TPS for Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, South Sudan and Venezuela.
The Supreme Court in October 2025 granted an emergency request by the Trump administration to end TPS for over 300,000 Venezuelan migrants in the United States.
“President Trump is restoring America’s immigration system so that it actually benefits the U.S. citizen and today’s Supreme Court victory is a win for the American people and commonsense,” former Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said at the time.
“The American people should not have had to go to the Supreme Court twice to see justice done. Temporary Protected Status was always supposed to be just that: Temporary. Yet, previous administrations abused, exploited, and mangled TPS into a de facto amnesty program. Meanwhile, the Biden administration allowed millions of unvetted illegal aliens into our country exacerbating the issue and endangering all Americans. Now, that it’s clear the law and the American people are on our side, Secretary Noem will continue to use every tool at our disposal to prioritize the safety of all U.S. citizens,” she added.
SCOTUSblog has more:
In September 2025, roughly nine months after the Assad regime was overthrown, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that she would terminate that designation, effective Nov. 21, 2025. She cited efforts by the new Syrian government, led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa, to “move the country to a stable institutional governance, not a perpetuation of armed conflict.” Moreover, she added, even if “extraordinary” and “temporary” conditions continued to prevail in Syria, she had determined that it would be “contrary to the national interest” to allow the TPS designation to continue.
A group of Syrian nationals went to federal court in New York to challenge Noem’s termination of Syria’s TPS designation. They contended that her decision violated the federal law governing administrative agencies because she had made it “prior to consulting appropriate executive agencies” and “without regard to Syria’s dire country conditions.” Moreover, they added, the decision was also unconstitutional because it was “motivated, at least in part, by racial, ethnic, and national-origin-based animus.”
U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla issued an order on Nov. 19 that indefinitely postponed the termination of the Syrian TPS program.
The government asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit to put Failla’s order on hold while it appealed. It declined to do so. In a three-page order on Feb. 17, the court of appeals acknowledged that the Supreme Court had cleared the way for the federal government to terminate other TPS designations. But those cases, the court of appeals wrote, “involved a TPS designation of a different country, with different factual circumstances, and different grounds for resolution by the district court. In light of these differences,” the court of appeals concluded, “and because the Supreme Court’s stay orders contained no explanation of their grounds for granting emergency relief, they are not dispositive of our analysis of the merits in this dispute.”
